No Nos Representan

No Nos Representan

Irene Muñoz Martin

Synopsis

We enter a living painting: actors demonstrating to the cries of “They don’t represent us!”, the rallying slogan of the Anti-austerity movement in the “Puerta del Sol” square, who in 2011 shared their desire to create an original space of direct democracy. Like Irène Muñoz Martin. In this personal essay, she returns to this experience that has not yet found its “expression”: a canonical image that she attempts to capture, in vain. This impossibility leads her to examine the history of art and its capacity to be a vehicle of ideology, through the observation of students copying classical works by the Spanish masters at the School of Fine Arts in Madrid, or the evocation of an episode of the Civil War, when the Republicans organised the evacuation of these same paintings to Switzerland—a rescue operation that Franco reclaimed to his benefit. In bringing together events that are distant in time and space, the filmmaker produces a fascinating reading of the notions of the copy and the original and makes official History and the past interact with the ambiguous and plural representation of the political struggles of the present.